Reverb tanks

m_c

Say somebody had the probably daft idea of taking one of the many available acuutronic/belton reverb tanks, and wanted to make a pedal using said reverb tank, where would you find information on how to design the reverb tank into a functioning circuit?

Adam_MD

I’d ask the guys on Madbean.  

m_c

I think I've just found a very big rabbit hole..

The surfybear looks good (I've actually looked at that before, but had forgotten about it), although I'm not sure about the new SMD version without the ability to add a decay (I'll save reading the big SG101 thread until I need to cure some insomnia!)
M-Kresol's / Quantum Effects Ruthenium Reverb looks interesting.

ICBM

Unless you actually want it to crash when you kick it - and admittedly that is a cool feature - then you're honestly better not bothering. Modern digital reverbs are so close to the sound of a spring reverb that it's hard to tell any difference, other than that the spring reverb is likely to pick up noise as well. Having A/B'd a Boss FRV-1 against an original '64 Fender 6G15 reverb unit I'm quite sure of this.

m_c

Very valid points @ICBM.
What I'd really like is a BigSky or RV-500, but I really need to stop spending that kind of money on guitar pedals for a while.

This is more to do with me just liking the idea of having a reverb tank in a big pedal, because I can. Not because it'll likely be any good.

thermionic

Look for a used Danelectro Spring King. It even has a "kick pad" to get the springs crashing.

ICBM

thermionic said:

Look for a used Danelectro Spring King. It even has a "kick pad" to get the springs crashing.

These are massively variable for the quality of sound and the amount of noise they pick up, for some reason. A friend of mine had two - one was good, the other was crap. I couldn't actually work out why!

bbill335

The boss FRV1 is very nice, but if you want a real tank then get/build a SurfyBear.